Shockwave
by RT7
Summary: Set after The Runaway Bride, before Smith and Jones. When the TARDIS becomes stranded on a mysterious unnamed planet, he must fight the mysterious forces at work in a bid to escape. But can he face his own past?
1. Tremors

_A/N – This is the first fic I've written in a long time, so I apologise in advance for...well, the entire thing really. ;) _

_A lot of this fic is based on a dream that I had once, which seemed to link together quite well. Just a quick author's note – it's set in the time between The Runaway Bride and Smith and Jones, so the Doctor is currently alone. This is half because I don't know much about Martha Jones (then again, not many people do – she's still new) and because she doesn't really fit into it anyway. You'll see why later. Also, sorry it takes a while to get going._

_I don't own Doctor Who or any of the associated areas of it, if I did then chances are I wouldn't be writing this right now._

_Please R&R, authors live on feedback! _

* * *

There was a large tremor. The TARDIS shook violently, flinging the Doctor backwards away from the control panel and onto the floor. Like some sort of time-travelling ninja, he immediatly sprung to his feet, grinned and jumped back up to resume his position at the controls. He loved a challenge.

"Right then." he began muttering to himself, as he always did, "What's wrong, old girl?"

There was another violent tremor, as if by response to his question. The Doctor frowned and held onto the rail surrounding the central column. On the other hand, this was a challenge that maybe he shouldn't have been so excited about. The TARDIS was well-known (by those that had travelled in it) for shaking like a small earthquake from time to time, but this was one of those "special times" where it was shaking, but in a peculiar way. The intervals inbetween the end and start of the tremors seemed to form a rough pattern, and while the Doctor suspected that sinister forces were at work, his optimism soon grew and he put it down to coincidence. He would be landing soon. It had been at least two weeks (well, maybe more, maybe less – the TARDIS was a time machine after all) since the events involving Donna and the Racnoss incident on Earth, and the TARDIS was now drifting far, far away from the over-visited blue and green planet. It wasn't that he hated the planet – after all, Earth was famous for being the home planet of bananas, one of the Doctor's favourite things. That, and when he compared them to some of the spear-weilding ape-like creatures in the universe, the humans weren't so bad. Brilliant, in fact. After a few minutes of thinking about the Earth, the Doctor remembered why he was taking a break from there. Earth was where she left.

Here he was, the Lonely God, wandering alone through space once more, albeit with a lot more shaking than wandering often entailed. For some reason, the Doctor had temporarily decided to take the effort for fixing the TARDIS, and instead put into performing other actions instead. One such action involved sitting crosslegged on the floor, looking up at the ceiling of the dome-shaped room and reflecting on everything he'd done his entire life. The moment he thought of his granddaughter Susan, he shook his head and immediatly stopped this potentially long and tedious process. Pausing only to pick up the sonic screwdriver which had been jostled out of his pocket through the tremors, he grabbed onto the rail and pulled himself to his feet. It was time to fix the damned thing. With newfound dedication to fix the TARDIS's flight pattern, he marched towards the panel. About what he counted to be half a second, he found himself on the other side of the room, sprawled on the floor. A flashing monitor revealed to him the TARDIS's location.

"...is there planet an even there?" he grumbled to himself, rubbing his head. "No, even a planet. That's the one!". Although worried that he'd hurt himself (because nobody else was there to yell "Doctor!" – something that he refused to admit he missed), he began to contemplate the facts he had been presented with. It was a rare occasion. While he knew exactly what part of space he was in, he had just entered the outskirts of a planet's atmosphere – a planet which he had never seen nor heard of...ever.

"This can't be right. I know everything! Why don't I know this?" he questioned, folding his arms and sighing. When it became apparant that he wasn't going to get an answer, the Doctor buried his ace in his hands. "I'm going to have to take a look."

The tremors came to a halt. The Doctor bolted for the door, and opened it. Just like every other time he opened the TARDIS door midflight in space, the view was incredible. Breathing in, the Doctor began looking for something. Anything. Preferably something which would explain why his flight was disrupted. As the TARDIS rotated slowly, due to the engines shutting off, he felt something was wrong. Just as the Doctor's instinct told him to, he ducked, just as a large bolt of electricity flew at the spot in space and time where his head had been, flew backwards in the direction of the control panel and there was a small explosion. Ignoring it, the Doctor extended his search into the direction the bolt had come from. When he saw where it had come from, his expression changed from one of worry to one of intrigue. He reached into his pocket, took out what looked like a small disposible camera and took a couple of holiday snapshots.

It was a cluster of gold-coloured stars, in a vortex formation. They were spinning slowly – something must have happened to them within the last hundred years or so, but what? In order to create such a spectacle, there must have been quite an event.

"Explosion? Implosion? Teleportation? Racnoss?" he wondered aloud. The Doctor decided that going back in time and finding out wasn't the best idea, considering that the control panel had been electrocuted recently, and touching it was probably out of the question. Instead, the sight of a small, very orange dusty planet came into sight, and he had a more 'creative' idea. It was time for a closer look, bit how?

Suddenly, the console behind him lit up with a bright golden, unnatural glow. The Doctor span on the spot to look at it, before shielding his eyes with his arm. There was something familiar about it – the colour, not the glow, as if it was clawing at his distant memories. Before he knew what was happening, the TARDIS began to hurtle towards the planet below. The Doctor grinned.

"Good, I was just starting to get bored."


	2. Layers

Smiling to himself, the Doctor merely closed the doors, turned around and hit the deck. The blue "police box" hurtled towards the planet at an alarming rate, spinning faster and faster, but not changing course. It was then and only then that the Doctor realised something. He clambered to his feet, working out calculations and all sorts of technical things in his head, half-relevant to the issue at hand, and pulled himself towards the TARDIS control panel. The Doctor muttered and mumbled as fast as he could to himself, occasionally sprouting words such as "velocity", "atmosphere" and even "banana". As he struggled to remain standing, he soon shrugged off most of these words, and remembered five (or four, to be technical) words which filled him with hope: "Tribophysical waveform macro-kinetic extrapolator". Luckily for him, all the shaking and rumbling that the TARDIS has undergone had dislodged the Extrapolator from its home in the TARDIS, and it was currently rattling around on the floor somewhere. Rethinking that, the Doctor momentarily questioned if it was lucky or not, before dramatically leaping for it. He picked it up, and, cradling it in his arms like a newborn baby, turned to face the door. The Doctor walked towards it in a sombre fashion, looking upwards and around the room.

"So many memories. So little time."

The moment was broken by a beeping noise and a flashing symbol on a monitor. Something was amiss. The Doctor, having seen and done nearly everything, was not as shocked as a human being would have been, but it was still odd. In a way, he sort of wished that a human being had been there to point it out, so that he could reassure them and try to figure out what was wrong – just as he had done with Rose. A name which haunted him, despite what he told himself. Before he could take another trip down memory lane, the blinking on the monitor reminded him of what was wrong. He should have been dead. Something was keeping the TARDIS and him alive. The monitors revealed that there was a layer of extremely poisonous, yet invisible, electrical-based gas surrounding the planet, which would fry any electrical equipment or life inside it – just like a mini-delta wave. Luckily for the Doctor, he managed to avoid thinking about the last time he'd nearly come face to face with a Delta Wave – albeit his own, and what it nearly cost him. Not only had he passed the layer of gas, but the TARDIS doors were ajar.

"No turning back now. Something is wrong here."

If something was protecting him from the outside peril, then that meant that it had some form of control over the TARDIS. This meant that while it could have been friendly, there was a chance that the opposite was true – and that something was after him. The Doctor had to get away. Continuing the plan he formulated before the distraction, he walked over to the doors and fully opened them once more. The beautiful view was now slightly hampered by the planet, which was no longer a bright shade of orange – but more a very dark blue. As much as he would have wanted to continue staring at the planet (which he did, and intended to at a future point in time), the Doctor's calculations meant that he had about a minute or so before impact. Sighing, he pointed the sonic screwdriver at the central control panel. A familiar buzzing noise echoed through the air, as the TARDIS's power shut down.

The doors shut behind him.

* * *

_A/N: Sorry for the short chapter._


	3. Downfall

_A/N – I need to apologise the last chapter. It was late, I was bored and probably more tired than necessary, so it may seem a little bit rushed and short. Again, sorry about that. I'll try to do better in the future._

_Thanks to everyone (online or offline) who provided feedback so far. Don't worry, I am going somewhere with this story, I'm not making it up as I go along. :P_

_Oh, and one thing about the first chapter which people are taking to be a mistake. "...is there planet an even there?" doesn't contain a typo – remember that the Doctor was thrown halfway across the room just before saying it. People say funny stuff when they hit their head. Just wanted to point that out._

* * *

'_I must be going crazy...then again, 900 years might do that' _the Doctor thought to himself, as the doors slammed shut and he was left outside of the TARDIS. Almost instantly, he was dragged towards the planet by some unknown force, like a ball bearing to a giant magnet. While this was no new experience to the Doctor, he was slightly shocked. The sensation itself was incredible – he felt like a rag doll, yet able to move his arms and legs, but not the flight path. Also unlike a rag doll, he wasn't heading for a hole in the garden where the dog would bury it, but rather the now dark-blue planet beneath him. There were so many mysteries unsolved that the Doctor had no idea where to begin, although he decided that maybe if he survived the impact, he would choose then. 

Normally, he would have spoken out loud to himself (out of habit, nobody was there to listen this time), but for some reason he didn't feel like exposing his thoughts out loud this time. So, he reached into his inside pocket and pulled the sonic screwdriver out of his supposedly-hammerspacial pockets. He made an adjustment and pushed the button, aiming it in the direction that he was heading. Just as the Doctor suspected, there was a signal, which was lessened by the sonic screwdriver. The Doctor began to fall at a slower speed, but it was still too fast. If he didn't do something, then he'd be crushed when he reached the ground...if he was heading for the ground, that is. If he was heading directly towards something with this much power, then he considered that the ground might be a better option.

Above, the TARDIS was slowly drifting towards the ground as well. It wasn't going nearly as fast as he was, and it looked like it had escaped the pulling force...as if it was aimed at the Doctor himself. That was when the Doctor realised what he had to do, not only to save himself, but the TARDIS too. He waved his arms a bit and slowly (but surely) leant a tiny bit to the left. In a matter of seconds, he executed his plan. The Extrapolator sprung into life, 'bumping' against the signal and sending itself, along with the Doctor, flying out of the signal's grip and down towards the planet at an alarming rate.

"_Ah. Maybe that wasn't the best idea."_

As he flew uncontrollably across the atmosphere, another mysterious bolt of lightning threw itself in his direction from somewhere above. However, he didn't need to avoid it – the bolt merely ricocheted off the Extrapolator and went somewhere else

"_Where is this lightning coming from?"_

Above, the gold-coloured star vortex thing was glimmering, as if winking at him. The Doctor did not take this as a positive sign.

"_Just what is that?"_

It fired another lightning bolt, which was also deflected by the extrapolator.

"_Who the heck am I talking to?"_

Shortly after, as he was falling, a fourth lightning bolt struck – but this one was different. It hit directly centre of the invisible force field being generated by the extrapolator, the force of which pushed the Doctor directly downwards at the planet. As the TARDIS span slowly and gracefully towards the ground, free of the pull and now on autopilot, a rare sound filled the air.

The Doctor screaming.

* * *

_A/N - Please R&R! Thanks._


End file.
